NETWORK BUSY
It was light when even that stopped. The lines went completely dead again. Nothing, not even a buuuuuuur. I cursed myself for not having even tried to get the voicemails – but at least I had the messages. I looked at them, the messages on my phone, on my mum’s, on Simon’s, on Ronnie’s. And you know what . . . what all of them, what they all said, maybe not the exact words, but pretty much what they all said was: ARE YOU OK?!
NO! No, no, no!
No! I’m not OK!
To my dad, I texted back, just in case it would get through:
Coming to you. Ruby x
I hit send; the message failed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
No problem: I had a plan.
Just in case I saw anyone I knew alive, I went up to the bathroom to sort my make-up out. I got another fright then: even in the dim light of dawn, I saw my eyes were small and red and puffy and piggy, serious bags underneath. The Caspar-snog scab on my chin was much reduced and flaking off. OK; it had been itching and I might have been having a slight pick at it. The skin underneath was baby pink. I smoothed a couple of wipes over my face, then plastered on the wonder-foundation I’d rescued from Zak’s, went in heavy with the mascara and slathered my hair with the last of the glittery dry-shampoo. The only way around the ‘Is it glitter or is it dandruff?’ problem was to go for maximum coverage. I slicked on frosted pink lipstick.
I looked a bit space-age babe, but that was OK. I didn’t even pack, I just shovelled all the mobiles, Caspar’s MP3 and my purse into my bag. Good to go.
I suppose I could have stood in the road and screamed my head off until someone, anyone, came . . . but I’d thought about the man up at the big house, and the supermarket gunmen. ‘Someone, anyone’ was not a good idea . . . so I’d go to the police. That’s what they’re there for, isn’t it, to help people? That’s what they HAVE to do. Oh! Oh! Oh! I could picture it: how I’d tell them what had happened, and about how I had to get to London, and how a policeman would say, ‘All right, love, no need to worry. We’ll take you.’ They’d pretty much have to, wouldn’t they? I mean, even if there were just a couple of them left they couldn’t just leave a girl who was only just fifteen years old on her own, could they? They’d have to help.
I think I can pretty much say that was the last normal thing I ever tried to do.
When did I realise it was hopeless? When the garden gate clanged shut and I heard all the neighbours’ dogs start up? When that made me remember – dur – to look at the sky? (Which was OK, it was OK. I remember it as fine and clear – but you know what? Really – unless you live in some gorgeously rainless desert – when have you ever seen a perfect clear blue sky? There always seems to be some little blobby wisp or smudge of something hanging around somewhere.)
Did I realise it was hopeless when I tried to whizz down the hill on my bike like I’d usually do only I couldn’t because – hey, remember? – there were cars and dead bodies everywhere? When I didn’t see a single living soul the whole way there? Or perhaps when I got there? Yes, definitely then. There was a police car parked sideways across the driveway and a whiteboard notice propped against it; whatever had been written on it had slid to streaks of black and red in the rain.
I tried the main door. It was all locked up. A part of me I didn’t much want to listen to had known it would be. The other part of me, the part that didn’t know that, stared at that building – and realised. On the front of the police station and spreading around the sides, there was a wall of messages people had left. Most so rain-blitzed you couldn’t tell what they said – but the photos . . . on even the most rain-blitzed you could still make out faces, blobs of faces that had once been real people: snaps from holidays, portraits from school, photobooth photos, a photo that showed a bride and groom. I wandered up and down. People I didn’t know; people I thought I sort of recognised; people I thought I definitely did.
Photos of people who were probably dead put up by people who were also probably dead.
I stalked back to the main door. Safe inside a glass case: their stupid police notices about terrorism and pickpockets and rabies and Neighbourhood Watch.
I kicked the front door.
How DARE they not be there? How COULD they not be there?
Worse than the frantic bark of a scared and hungry dog is the cry of a human, trapped.
If there’d been traffic on the road, if the world had been halfway normal, I don’t suppose I would have heard them. But in the silence I did. I did and my heart lurched with dread. I pressed my ear to the door. I could hear men shouting for help . . . so muffled I felt like maybe I had gone crazy and was hearing things – but no; I could hear them.
‘HELLO?! HELLO?!’ I screamed, top of my voice, kicking that door, battering my fists against it.
When I stopped I could hear them, more clearly then, even before I pressed my ear to the door and heard those voices – muffled – hollering ‘HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!’
I didn’t understand, did I? My heart and guts told me this was bad; in my head I thought . . . I dunno what I thought: that maybe the police were locked inside?!
I circled round the building. Dartbridge Police Station isn’t like some Wild West jail – it’s a big, officey kind of place with tons of windows; none were open, but inside all I could see was desks . . . until I got to the back of the building where there was a row of six small high windows – not officey at all, but those kind of ripply glass bricks you get at swimming pools and stuff.
That ‘HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!’ . . . this was where it was coming from.
‘HEY! HEY!’ I shouted at the top of my voice.
At each window, the ripply shadows of human heads appeared.
‘HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!’ they screamed.
‘HELLO?!’ I screamed back.
‘HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!’ they screamed.
The ripply shadows of human fists battered at the glass.
The penny dropped. With a sickening, massive clunk. Those men weren’t police; they were locked in cells.
I heard this rustle behind me. I turned. There was THIS THING. AND THIS MINI THING.
They were human, I suppose; roughly human in shape, but the whole of them, their whole bodies from head to toe were swathed in black plastic and masking tape. That’s all I took in, that and that the big one had a really weird lumpy, bulgy shape and the little one was carrying some kind of enormous green gun.
I could choose not to say this, but I have said I will try to be honest. I fainted.
In romantic novels and stuff, women in corsets and big puffy skirts faint. They faint because . . . I dunno . . . someone has put a stitch in the wrong place in their needlework or they’ve just realised they’ve got a crush on the vicar or something . . . and some hot bloke (or the vicar, who turns out to be hot) scoops them up and revives them. With a nice strong cup of tea, probably, or perhaps a tiny silver thimbleful of French brandy.
I fainted in real life. I fainted because I’d had nothing to eat, next-to-nothing to drink and because I was completely, totally and utterly exhausted and freaked out. I think maybe my fear-fried brain took one look at those THINGS and thought, That’s it: lights out.
I didn’t swoon into my skirts, I went smack down.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was like the worst of your most embarrassing nightmares about school come true. You know, when you suddenly realise you haven’t actually got any clothes on in the middle of double maths and everyone is laughing at you and whatever you find to cover yourself with shrinks to the size of a hankie or goes see-through in your hands; or you suddenly need a poo and all the toilets are locked, but it’s coming out anyway and you have to run everywhere trying to find a private place to go, but there isn’t one; or you dream you’re kissing some disgusting – like, really disgusting – boy you wouldn’t ever EVER EVER want to kiss.
You know what I mean? The kind of nightmare you wouldn’t even want to tell your best friend? Cos it’s TOO weird
and TOO disgusting? Even though you basically trust your best friend completely, but there’s this fear she might laugh her head off and tell everyone? (And then they’d all laugh at you, just like how it was in your nightmare?)
When I woke up, I was in the recovery position – know what that is? It’s how you lie people when they’ve just fainted or had some other kind of hideous thing happen. So they don’t choke on their own spew. I woke up with the side of my face stuck to a bin-liner and . . . and . . . I opened my eyes and practically lying on the bin-liner in front of my face was another face. The speccy, spotty, spoddy, nerdy face of . . .
Sixth-form freak. Speccy, spotty, spoddy, nerdy, nobody freak.
‘Ruby?’ he said.
His face was about half a nanometre from mine.
I gasped in utter horror, shoved him away and sat up – too fast; little fuzzy fairyballs of light danced in the air around the face of –
‘Here,’ he said, practically drowning me as he sloshed water into my mouth.
I peeled the bin-liner off my face, snatched the bottle from him and glugged; it was yukkily warm.
Sip, I heard my mum say. Sip, Ruby. For another few seconds more I ignored her, then I forced myself to slow down. To sip.
I remember I looked at that bottle and I could see backwash flecks floating in it – which couldn’t have been mine, being as how I’d not eaten anything. YEURCH!
That is pretty much when I knew for sure that I wasn’t having some weird nightmare/dream thing, but I really was where I was . . . with –
‘What have you done to your hair?’ he said.
Darius Spratt.
Unlike whatever they do in novels and stuff, making up all sorts of fancy names to make some kind of lit-err-arr-ee point, or even what they used to do changing names to protect the innocent in newspapers and things, this name has not been changed. Darius Spratt. If that was my surname, I would change it immediately . . . and even if I couldn’t or I felt like I shouldn’t for some family reason – like maybe my ancestors had discovered a country (Sprattland) – or at least an island (The Isle of Spratt) – or left their tiny village (Sprattington), emigrated and founded a city (Sprattsville, USA) . . . I would definitely no way not ever call my child Darius. I would call him, I dunno, Mark or Steven or something. Calling your kid that, Darius . . . it’s just drawing attention to it, isn’t it? It’s just like putting up some massive arrow, pointing to the word S-P-R-A-T-T . . . so you see it in huge white letters, like the HOLLYWOOD sign.
SPRATTYWOOD
It amazed me, even then, even in the middle of the most massive trauma that had ever happened to me or the world – not the fainting, specifically, but the whole of the rest of everything – that I could remember his name, that I even knew who he was. I had never spoken to him before in my life; why would I? He was the King of Losersville. No, not the King at all – that’d probably have to be Ross Ramsden, so massively a creepy saddo his only friends were teachers, and you could tell that even they didn’t like him much.
Darius Spratt was not the King of Losersville; he wasn’t even the Crown Prince; he wasn’t even a lowly serf. He was, like I said, a nobody speccy freckly freak.
My Knight in Bin Bag Armour. HAHAHAHAHAHA-HUUUUUUUUR.
‘Nothing!’ I snapped, in response to the hair question. Total cheek, Nerd Boy.
‘Do you need something to eat?’ he asked.
Urch! TONE. Tone like . . . like Simon’s. Like asking a question when really there is no question. URCH. YEURCH. Like when really he was saying, ‘Young lady, I think you need something to eat. Right now!’
He glanced at the sky, removed the elastic bands (oh yes) from the tops of his bright yellow rubber gloves (they’re all the rage this season) so he could get them off and then tore (manfully – not!) through the bin bag covering his weedy chest. He was wearing a cagoule under it anyway, and on top of that there was a rucksack; he rummaged in it and pulled out a crumpled jumbo bag of peanuts. An open crumpled jumbo bag of peanuts. Well, that would explain the backwash.
YEURCH! CAN YOU EVER IMAGINE ANYTHING MORE DISGUSTING?!
I scoffed a couple of handfuls.
‘Got any more water?’ I asked, teeth sticky.
He looked at the sky again – as if it’d have changed, that quick! No cloud is that fast! – and then (manfully – not!) tore off more of his bin bag armour until he could get to the rucksack on his back. This he plonked down, opened and pulled out a bottle of water – but not before I saw the bag was full – I mean, like, FULL – of water and boxes of tablets. Whatever. I snatched the water off him and glugged. Sipped. Glugged. Sipped. Glugged – Darius Spratt snatched the water back.
‘Hey!’ I said, getting to my feet. Little fuzzy fairyballs of light danced in the air, but not so many.
‘Slow down,’ the Spratt said.
I snatched the water back and glugged more.
I saw the kid then. The Mini-Me Thing with the space gun . . . the gun that was one of those super-soaking, water-gun things. Plastic. It – she, as I was about to find out – was all taped up; seemed like the breathing hole wasn’t quite in the right place because the bin bag around it sucked back and forth, and you couldn’t even see her eyes although there were little slits for them.
‘Who’s that?’ I said, in between glugs.
‘I dunno,’ said Darius Spratt.
I lowered the bottle and I looked at him; like, what?
‘She doesn’t speak. I just found her.’ He thought for a moment. ‘She found me, actually. At school,’ he said, and pointed.
He pointed like I didn’t know where our school was – which was, like, about three minutes up the road. I mean, of all the places I had thought about going and all the places I hadn’t thought about and probably should have gone to, what had never, ever, not even for a trillionth of a millisecond crossed my mind was –
‘School?!’ I said.
(Tone. Note the tone. The whole world had . . . and he had . . . gone to SCHOOL?!)
Darius shrugged.
‘Well, what are you doing here?’ he asked.
I shrugged.
See . . . I think this is the worst thing you could know about me. Or one of them. It’s worse than the guinea pigs. I would . . . I might . . . have just gone. If it hadn’t been for bumping into Darius Spratt I would . . . I might . . . maybe I would have just left those men. Maybe I would have done. Maybe I was too scared to break into a police station and –
‘There are people trapped in there,’ I said. ‘I’m gonna get them out.’
Was I? Was I really?
He didn’t shrug, but he made this noise, this ‘hn’ grunt-sound that was just the same as a shrug. It had no tone, it was just ‘hn’.
‘You knew?!’ I said.
‘Hn.’
‘Well, we can’t just leave them!’
He didn’t say anything then. Not even a ‘hn’.
‘I’m going to get them out,’ I said.
I snatched the peanuts off him, guzzled some, then guzzled some water. I think, honestly, I was sort of hoping he’d say something – like come up with some really, really good reason why we should just go. He didn’t.
‘Right,’ I said. I looked around . . . er, yeah, like I was looking for some way to break in and I wouldn’t be able to find one and then I’d have to go.
‘I’ve got this,’ said Darius Spratt. He pulled some weedy hammer out of his rucksack.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
I took it, just hoping he’d go away so then I could too.
I stalked off and sized up windows.
GO AWAY, GO AWAY, GO AWAY. Every time I looked around, Darius and the kid were still there, following me.
‘Look, just off, will you? If you’re not going to help,’ I said as I strode past him.
I got back round to the front door. I attacked it. It was some kind of special glass; the hammer bounced off. Who’d have thought it? Dartbridge Police Station has special anti-smash glass! With any l
uck, all the windows would be like that and I could give up (with dignity). I stalked back round the building; Darius Spratt and the small black plastic one followed. I tried another window and it smashed instantly, like normal glass smashes. And instantly –
‘HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!’
You could hear them clearly.
‘A bit more clearly’, I want to say, but, really, it was totally clearly. There was no going back.
That window; it was too high up for me to just climb in on my own. I looked at Darius Spratt.
‘HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!’
‘This is stupid,’ he said. ‘This is so stupid.’
I was going to yee-haa and then some, because the way Darius Spratt said that, it was like a Simon way to say that – like: YOU are stupid – but he stepped forward and gave me a leg-up. I could feel his feeble arms straining while I hacked away the remaining glass, then I hauled myself in, on top of someone’s desk.
‘HEY! HELP! HEY! HEY!’
I opened the window and Beanpole Boy heaved himself in after me, rucksacks and all, then turned and waggled a finger at the Bin-Bag Kid (BBK).
‘You stay there,’ he said. ‘Anyone comes, you run. You hide. Go to the school. You know where.’
I dunno whether the BBK understood that; she didn’t move.
So there was this door to where they were, a door that was locked. A door that led to another door – with a nothing space, a bench in it, in between. Other side of that, you could hear them shouting.
Locks have keys. Keys get kept places.
Annoyingly, it was Darius who found them – at the front desk, the place where you go to tell the police stuff, like help, help, the whole town’s rioting, or that someone’s stolen your bike (which you’d forgotten to lock). Behind that was a ton of keys. Those got us through the nowhere space. When we came into the corridor of cells, those men started screaming.
The Rain Page 13